According to some related art, an IP address of a device can be used to infer a geographic location of a user. In online systems, the use of IP addresses of user terminals to infer user geographic location has broad applications. For example, the user geographic location can be inferred from the IP address of a device for use in online information display, application monitoring, network diagnosis, and the like. As an example, in the display of online information, if a user's IP address (e.g., the IP address of the device used by the user) can be used to accurately infer the user's geographic location, then display information near the user's geographic location (e.g., information relating to movie theaters, restaurants, and shopping places near the user's location) can be displayed on a website. The determination (e.g., inference) of a user's geographic location using an IP address of a device requires an IP address and a geographic coordinate information database (e.g., a mapping of IP addresses to geographic coordinate information). There are approximately 4.2 billion IP addresses included in the exhausted IPv4 addresses. Accordingly, if the geographic coordinate information corresponding to each IP address was directly used, the IP address and geographic coordinate information database used to infer a user's geographic location would require approximately 4.2 billion records. The use of so much data online would result in very large performance stresses. For example, the efficiency associated with querying such an IP address and geographic coordinate information database would be very low. According to some related art, in order to reduce the performance stress associated with querying a database for determining a geographic location associated with an IP address, the IP address is generally divided (e.g., segmented) into fields according to the first three numbers in an IP address having a dot-decimal format. However, such segmentation of an IP address is nothing more than simply delineating fields according to IP address quantities without any indication or knowledge of the geographic coordinates corresponding to each delineated field of the IP address. In addition, IP addresses are not delineated based on geographic locations. Accordingly, such segmentation of an IP address has significant limitations for use in connection with location service applications.
To summarize the above, there is a need for a scheme to divide IP addresses into fields, to associate geographic locations with an IP address field, and to determine the geographic location corresponding to each IP address field in order to increase IP address querying efficiency.